as ever – and smugly I carriedthe weight of my burdeninto the glorious mess of my future. Now, with a view

from the hilltop of more hillsbut fewer and steeper, it’s timeto take stock. Is Socrateswiser or simply unhappy?

Wisdom or rubies? The choiceacademic so late in the game.Back then I was clothedin such confident motley –

the badges, the denim, the blueshaded lenses (the silk andthe hide and the wool ofconformity). Now I am closer

to naked than ever - poor, bare and forked and aloneon this hilltop. But in betweenone breath and another,

the gap between heartbeats,I seem to be happy, herewhere the pig hunts for trufflesand Socrates dreams.

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on 's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. King Lear, Act 3, Scene IV

January 21, 2015

January 12, 2015

PREFACE: IN THE DAYS OF THE BLOG...

There was a time not so very long ago, before the depredations of Facebook and Instagram, when this blog, amongst many, had a wide following. Each post would draw at least as many comments as any trenchant, topical or comic status update on Facebook might provoke today. The difference was that whilst that Facebook status, however well-received, will plummet down the fast-moving escallator of contributions within minutes, overtaken, eclipsed and submerged by the sheer weight and variety of material rising in its wake, the blog post would sit four-square, maybe for days or a week at a time, marinading in the mixture of reflective, carefully-considered comments that would appear.

The days of the personal blog have passed. I remain in contact via Facebook and email with nearly all of my closest blogging friends from those days, but with a handful of noble exceptions, our blogs are now lonely houses along a largely deserted highway. We continue to live here because a house is a home and we love the view. And in my case the Patteran Pages (founded in 2003) now acts as a gallery for occasional poems posted to a couple of prompt sites so there is still welcome traffic from time to time.

So the mammoth post below is very unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of old pals and the occasional wanderer who has got lost along this neglected highway. And of those who stop by there may be few who will persevere all the way to the end! But after 12 years I'm going nowhere so I'll post away as if nothing had changed. And if through the windows the road in both directions remains empty, I'll slip over to Facebook for a little company!

And so to the post...

:::

In 2007 I completed the fourth draft of a long poem entitled 'The Famous Flower'.

The original intention had been to select a group of traditional songs from Scottish/Irish/English sources and expand them into fuller narratives, extrapolating from the main storyline and developing some of the more allusive aspects. They would then be presented as a sort of suite of poems, sharing some reflection of the style and idiom of the original ballads, but embodying elements of a more contemporary concern with character and motivation.

I wrote up a version of the Anglo-Irish song, The Dark-Eyed Sailor, but subsequently failed to find anything else that seemed to lend itself to similar treatment. Until I rediscovered Martin Carthy's version of a 17th century ballad, The Famous Flower of Serving Men originally written by one Laurence Price and subsequently augmented anonymously over the centuries by the good old folk process. A wonderfully dark and sinuous tale, it provided all sorts of possibilities for exploration and extension. What I didn't intend at the outset was to end up with a piece running to over 4,000 words!

Here it is in its mighty entirety with the narrative shared between Fair Eleanor, her King and the voice of the invisible Chorus. But first, listen to Martin Carthy's exquisite rendition of the song...

This is how it was. So long a journeyfrom that place of blood to this whitethorn fire; from the scattering of the may blossom to the blowingof these hag-tree ashes amongst the bones.

This is how it was. It is a spring night.A hunter’s moon is trimming back the clouds.A vixen cries in the coppice. My baby suckles, eyes closed against the pulse of milk.My lover lifts an apple bough into the fireand turns to reach for another.

And, noiseless from the steep stair,unbidden, unheralded, five men are in my chamber like wraiths who find their form only in firelight. One has drawn his sword; the others bearknives. Unhindered by passion, free of guilt, they work like men harvesting in advance of a storm, brisk and thorough, tight-lipped and breathing hard.

My lover barely rises to his kneesand they cut him down, his mouthin a gargoyle grin, lipless and wrappedaround his jawline. Two more strokesand his right hand goes spinning downinto the hearth like a shed glove.

And a silence thickens the air.A light, green and glaucous,like through deep water, traps usbetween one moment and the next. The men pause, breathing heavy still, like cattle who have run the length of a field. I am a dreamer, motionless, looking beyond the instant. (I ama child wrapped in white furs,sleigh-bound across deep snow.I am a lover bearing the blessed weightof a lover on a bed of moss under pines).But my baby moves in my arms;he shifts his warm bodyinside the plaid shawl that wraps him,cranes his head to see our visitorsso as to smile his two small pearly teethat them, so as to fix his roundsea-blue eyes on them, so asto welcome them to our hearthwith his precious early words.

And one cuts him down.With skill. It must be said,with skill for his black bladepasses my face in a whisper, a thing half seen, half-imagined – the swift parabola of a bird glanced between two clouds, or a leaf blown in a hard wind. I feel its dangerous breath;I feel its voice deep within my cage of bones (as nowI hear it; as I shall hear it ever).

And my milky babe makes no soundas he passes swiftly from this place.Was present, is absentwith no sense of the journey made.(And this small grain of mercy,dropped from the store whose bounty it is God’s to grant or to withhold,is what I have hoardedthrough the long years).

They turn to go, their black cloaksgathered like Dominican shrouds,save for the sword-bearer, the baby-slayer. He throws backhis cowl and bares his face to showa lattice-work of scars, as if one has some time seized his hair behind and pushed his face against a blacksmith’s grateor a burning prison’s bars.My stepmother’s man. Now all’s as clear as a chain of falling water: my mother’s man, her seneschal, and this disfigurement her work,her hand in his hair in sudden anger. And yet still he does her will – this, all this, to forestall the white dove’s prophecy that, my father slain, the bastard son shall rise and rule.

And now he casts the sullied swordaway from him, towards the hearth,for man may not sheath a swordthat bears a baby’s blood and he fearsfor his immortal soul. Hilt and blade sing off the stone they fall upon. He turns and follows his companions down the winding stair, the scuff of their falling feet the onlywhispered valediction on that night.

::

The earth at the moat’s edgeis soft with the night’s rain.It yields to the broken sword,its hilt and tongue of blade.The winding sheet must be the plaid shawl that wound me through the winter by the fire as I gave breast and crooned the songs he took with him into his moonlit dreams. The sword, its hilt and bloody bladeare the cross of Christ to raiseabove my boy. The bell that tolls himthrough Eden’s gate is the blade struck hard against the mounting block (that block from which I would ride, laughing, to hunt the hind). His marker is this hawthorn spray. And the psalm is wound into the wordless sounds that, like some beast, its tongue rippedout by the root, I cry into the night.

And as dawn arises - curds and wheyin a heartless sky – I hack awaymy sunset locks, the hue of brass and goldthat once my lord would comb and plaitso that I would slumber, weightless,timeless and wave-borne. And the bone-white face, bound in a corolla of ragged flame, that shivers back at me from the morning water weeps for the last time. A man’s face now,drawn and grim, with sea-grey eyesthat always must look back towardswhere the hills encircle the birthing place,the bower, the hearth, the fire that died.

Clad in his hauberk and helmet and with his surcoat stained to black, I ride astride my dead lord’s destrier. I cross bridges numberless, pass over waters that roar like oblivion or slumber, unseen, unheard, until the marches fall away and the long, sad, flat reaches of the fens lift towards gentle hills and valleys and the questing loops and curls of hearthside fires rising. But pacing me like a woven skein I see the forest edge, now close with elm and larch and beech and oak, plaited against the light, now rimming the horizon become as the faintest memory of trees.

:::

THE KING

Thus it is, as commonplace as such arrivals are: a horseman comes alone out of the north, wearing the threads and hide of a week’s desperate weather. I watch him from above, the slow, unguided pricking steps towards the gate that he senses more than sees. Only a child or a woman should so embrace a horse’s neck, I note, as I turn toward the narrow stair and so descend to greet my fate.

It is said that all may know the road from its firstfew stones. Yes, and so it is. The courser standsat my bridgehead, blowing, his great head hanging.His rider lifts a bone-white face. Two sea-grey eyes look down. They neither ask, nor do they demand, nor do they plead. And as I wave away my two gatemen and step onto the bridge; and as I take up in my right hand the hanging reins; and as I brace against the heft of that slim body sliding down the horse’s sweating flank, I know of my heart’s turning; I know that now no moon will ever tug my tides again; I know in this instance that I am a king in thrall.

::

‘My famous flower’, I dub him, my Sweet William, and I bind him to me as my chamberlain, as chatelain, the hoops of keys that chime like muffled bells within the flowing robes he wears. Moons come and go; leaves form and fall and ever he moves down passages, through doorways, under arches cowled like a fragrant, pastel-drawn Dominican, his voice, so rarely heard, a grass-blown whisper. Some deep and distant sorrow hoods his eyes. He sees amongst the blazing logs and brancheslate at night swift phantoms, shifting spectres.From my chair I watch him, turning and turninghis empty flagon, fire blooding the marbleof his cheeks. And if I speak of this, my fingerson his wrist as one might seek to still the pulseof a sickly child, he leans away towards the darkbeyond the fire and I’m alone inside the light.And yet come dawn he pours my water - liftsthe ewer like an offering, fills the bowl, watching the water fall as if in benediction.All is ceremony: the cloth across his arm,the opening of the casement, the tippingof the ewer, the turning with the heavy bowl.And as at the heart of all such sacrament,there is, I know, I know, across the reachesof the passing days, the flame incarnadineof love. Not worship, fear or fealty, but love.

And from the tail of an eye I can spy them smirking like children, even those who wear my favours in their caps, those who hold demesnes at my good behest, those who havemy love as won in battle. Loyalty is mere duty.To know the lineaments of my soul so as to readmy true intent – there’s no one here can seebeyond the radiance of my crown, behind the lion’s golden face. No one save, perhaps,my silver son, my close and bounden one, my Sweet William, famous flower of serving men.

:::

FAIR ELEANOR

With the owl still calling from the oakand only a rim of red above the hills,my lord goes riding. Even before I have risen and slipped into my robeand tried the door between our chambers,he is gone. Although he keeps his unstrung bow and quivered arrows in with his tack below, I know he’s offto the hunt for his jerkin’s out of its press and his water’s poured. Whenever he rises as the stars fade,he goes alone. His bright hair coiledwithin his hood, the cloak that wraps himfashioned from darkness itself, he sets his saddle while the groomssleep on. By dawn he’s cleared the brakes and dykes and he’s reiningin at the forest’s edge. He knowswhere the hind drinks and wherethe boar roots, but he would as soonbring down with a single shaftthe one who follows with officioussword and shield to guard his kingas chase his chosen preythrough copse and thicket.

::

The wind rolls gentle from the westand as the sun’s wheel turns the day,the boys run down to the river wherea ship with an azure sail docks and unloadsspices, bolts of cloth and three caged falcons. And then, running fromthe sudden shower, tossing between thema painted leather ball, four-and-twenty of my lady the mother queen’s maidens.Now, joined by their lords and suitors,they scatter like crying seaside birds about the empty hall, chasing the arcing ballthrough fading sunbeam and gatheringshade. Alone beneath the great mantlebeam, before the unlit grate, I watchand yearn as the brace and girdle oftyrant memory hold me fast. And here,most alone, I close my eyes and cross my arms across my breast as one in the fastest sleep, a replica of death.

And through the whoop and halloo ofthose scampering fools, I hear as adeep enfolding echo the boom of doorsflung wide and the iron-shod clamourof a horse’s hooves on flagstones. AsI drop my arms and open my eyesto the dusty gloom, my lord is highabove me, wrenching his skittishcourser sideways so the better to lean and gather me up beforehis pommel, half across the horse’sneck and half in his encircling arms.And before the stilled and unbelievingcrowd, he kisses me cheek and chin and eyes and hair and weeps as onedistracted. Holding me hard with onetight shuddering arm as if I wereto drown, with his free arm he flailsthe air and cries to the company withinto quit this hall on pain of slaughter.And as they tumble in a moiling flightof legs and turning heads through theopen doorway, we must tumble too, outof the saddle and into the ashes ofthe empty hearth. Face to face we kneellike marble saints, his hands amongstmy cropped inglorious curls, his eyesdefying mine to spurn his gaze, beggingthat I should read some diamond-hardeffulgent truth within and so believefar beyond the call of simple hollow words.

But I am in retreat as all refractsand shivers into a halo of tears and allthat’s true and palpable are his twohands around my face and his breathagainst my lips. Rising, he lifts me andI’m guided gently pacing over rushes to a settle flush against the wall. We sit and with crooked finger, knuckle raised, he draws my tear back to its source and sighing deep and long just once, he tells his tale.

:::

THE KING

In at the day’s birth as I strap the girth beneath his belly. I hug his great headto still the hooves treading the straw,kicking the stable door. I want no blearygrooms fresh out of their dunghill dreamsto reach down bridle and harness half asleep,or a watchman, fresh on his rounds, eager to jump step and dance attendance on his king. I long for the dew to rise at my gallop; for the black air to part against my speed.I need, oh need, to bleach the livid phantomsthat visit me by night to tug intangibleat my sheets, that would have me cast offmy garments and cross those twenty pacesto your door and through to unleash havoc.So as I rein in at the forest’s edge and standhigh in my stirrups, I rejoice in my solitudeand breathe in lime and leaf-mould. Here,where the sudden trees crowd deep, I am one and one alone. And now as I edge us in betweenthe mighty boles to find the ancient trackslaid down before (so long before) our hubrishad us call each other king or commoner, I’m in my peace. My eyes are honed on the dark:I read the arcane script engrained in trunkof oak and sycamore; I watch the ooze of silver sap from the birch and golden from the maple.My ears are sifting every tiny sound – the fallof a single leaf through buttresses of brancheshigh above; the switch and turn of a weaseldeep inside the forest floor; the clap of thepigeon’s wings in a clearing half a league away.I urge my hunter forward. He picks and stepsacross and around the twisted roots and down the mossy banks. I stoop low in my saddle, my face along the horse’s neck and branches plucking at the bow across my back. One clearing and another and the bramble and the bracken yield to a pathway laid through thickets fettle-deep. I crane down low, half hanging, stirrup-free so as to seek for scats, or broken stems, or the trace of cloven hoof. I straighten and my yellow hair is laced with the rust of ferns and tiny flames of gorse.

And I rise into stillness; all is still and clear, as if the forest should slumber on the instant. I sit, ear tilted to the breeze, like a rabbit on a stump. And even as I sit the last breath of air subsides and all there is to hear is the blood-beat of man and beast, hunter and steed, two hearts that cross and chime. Light arrests and shadows freeze. I close my eyes against the mass of silence, here on the cusp of old familiar day and somethingjust beyond, something half-familiar fromthe hinterland of dreams and the dawn ofjust awakening. I open my eyes and therein three long shafts of light shining throughthe drooping canopy of a mighty beech,a hart of purest white stands motionless ona catafalque of woven fern and purest moss.His perfect neck is yielded as an offering,a steady pulse embossed like a silver cordfrom jaw to scapula. As one in the honey weight of sleep, I slide my yew bow from back to hand and lift an arrow to the nocking pointand draw the bowstring back to where my knuckle for a heartbeat touches the lobeof my right ear and I let the arrow fly.

Even as I lower the bow and grasp the pommelas my horse goes turning, turning in a gyreof sudden fear, I twist to see the ash-wood arrow run the fifty paces from this patch of loam to where the milk-white hart awaits, still as a patient lover. And that nave of air between us turns into a chamber charged with some strange humour, thick yet aqueous and my arrow passes like a cautious fish thatnoses forward, straight but circumspect. I watch the fletching ripple in the current; see the nock engraved like the cross of Christ; and I note the kissing moment of the head againstthat silver corded pulse to loose a plait of bloodgo twisting, purest red against the ivory. Then so lifts the caul, the draping veil and my horse, my brave Bellerophon, his nostrils drinking in the air like a swimmer risen, hacks back a step or two. He staggers and his haunches dropso that when I turn to spy the star-white hart,he’s gone. There’s blood upon the leaf and branchand fallen like ruby tears on the forest floor,but never a broken twig nor trampled covert,never a parted thicket nor spray upon the sand.

As if she flew thus trackless, the blood-trailtugs me spellbound through that dappled day, winds me into coiling nets of brambles, under the grappling arms of beeches, down through root-bound tunnels plunging, up the ferny sides of valleys, scattering pebbles crossing runnels, racing the long beams of the setting sun acrossthe sudden swards, chasing the bloody pearlsthat shine like buboes in the dying light untilat last the trail ends in a sanguine cross laidlike a marker at the forest’s edge and we spin and turn and sink, winded and blown, beneath the tresses and against the bole of a mighty oak.

Great shadows cloak the spreading moss beneath. Foxglove, heather, bluebell gleam within the gold and copper pools. And before us, laid like a mighty green and velvet cloth amongst the cautious trees that dare not tap the sacred earth beyond, a smoothand grassy glade. And in the centre, fixed like a boss,a tomb aligned from east to west, a single basalt box, the length of a man who would be blessed either head or foot by the long walk of the sun. And even as we catch our breath beneath the hanging branches, all the forest stills once more like a great settling of wings. Light withdraws; shadows blacken the turf like water rising from beneath its roots. No bird lifts or settles; no creature scatters the leaf-mould, troubles the canopies of leaves. Horse and man as one in battle, bold Bellerophon and I hold hardto the shade. He snickers once and tilts a hoof.I rise up in the saddle, shift a hand from pommelto sword hilt, watch unblinking as for a glintof dying light from a blade, or a thread of smoke.

Then, even as I gaze into the far treeline, a spectral form like a grounded cloud bleeds into the gap between two trees. In motion yet somehow glacial, standing clear as if forever fixed in place and time, the white hart, head turned back, the arrow proud and a bright chainof blood from neck to flank to earth that seems to tether him for the taking. I draw my sword(for arrows seem to pierce this beast in vain) and blade before I heel my charger forward.

From the touch of frog on clover, a hoof parting the paper bells, the song begins. Full-throated but so far away, as if it were blown like vapour through the crowded trees; so many voices pitched fromkeening trebles out of the thinnest air down to rich profundo rolling out of thunder, wordless, or in some tongue unspoken since the first footers made their mark on sand or parted grass. As if these tussocks were spikes of mist that rose from the skin of some enchanted lake, we glide, unsailed and rudderless, onto the sward.

As the pagan introit melts back into the trees, so fades like a fume the stilly hart, once chalk-white pelt, now smoke, now dream. Again, I close my eyes and shake the fancy out of seeing; open them and in wonder watch a dove - fashioned surely from the very salt and snow of my errant hart – go soaring high from that self-same place, into the dusky blue, now pocked with early stars. Then, like one such star, the dove comes falling, wheels and turns and alights upon the northern head of the sable tomb. I sheath my sword as we tread the carpet grass. Against the flawless black, the dove is silver, tipped and still like a crescent moon. And as we draw beside the tomb, it seems that through some silken valance, rippling like water, first a sleeping face and then the couchant form, full and clear, of an armoured knight reveals within, shield arm across a naked sword, sword arm severed from the wrist, his feet upon a serpent, coiled and striking. And as I slip to earth and make to kneel in some obeisance to this marvel, a voice as deep as the fastest clay, yet as close as two lips pursed in secret discourse at my ear begins at once to speak.

And the tale is your tale from the apple bough fire to the murdered babe, to the sword cast down by the hoodless penitent, your stepmother’s thrall. I feel the slicing of the air by silent blades; I hear the breath in the throats and mouths of labouring men; I smell the blood that gouts and eddies over the flags; I see your grey eyes in my own contorted face, hanging over the moat-water. And your grief, red-raw, laid open to the briny air, beats inside my own heart’s pulse and stills my very breath.

:::

FAIR ELEANOR

Oh, the bee’s-wing brush of fingerson my lips, the tender tug of fingersin my hair, the dry leaves of a voicefalling to silence through dust and dark.For a lifetime moment in the wake of the tale, there is the sound only of the wind in the chimney breast anda pigeon’s wings as she passes fromone high window to the next. And thenhe rises, rises as one so weary ofthe darkest transports of this world,and he stands half shadowed, half illumined and all about us in thatempty hall the strands and tressesof the two tales, his and mine, settleamongst the leaves and dust and dark.

But he is a king and bred into the warpand weft of pledges, oaths and fealties.His sword is dinged and dented froma hundred battles fought to breakor build within his realm of mountains,meads and rivers and beyond. And nowas he slowly turns as one out of latedreaming and into this time and placeof honour, debt and obligation, firerises behind his eyes, bone and sinew realign and his sword hand straysto the hilt. I am looking up at a manwho will reach for his bridle, who willclimb into his saddle and set his eyeson one dark mark upon a long horizon.And he will ride as straight and trueas a multitude of roads and passeswill allow, untroubled by reflection,guided by the lodestar retributionand the love entire and boundlessin whose radiance I am standing now.

:::

THE BLOOMING OF THE MAY

He takes a cohort of his finest –each man strange to mercy in the service of his king. Andbeneath a new device – a doveupon a sable field – in three daysthey are clear of our gentle lands;in four they cross the fens; andin a further six they reach the same hills that encircle the birthing place, the bower, the hearth where the fire died.

And on a lambent dawn fashionedmore for the properties of love,they burn her gatehouse, breach her mighty gates and sack her citadel. In a corner of her hall,she crouches like a shitting beastbehind her seneschal. He swingshis mace right-handed; in hisleft he wields a sword. He knowsthat he shall die and as he turnsand turns about, he sings out louda wordless song. My lord ensureswithin the circling of his bladethat, with a stroke, he seversthe seneschal’s right hand andwith another he guts his manand then steps back so bothmay watch him die amongsthis liver and his lights, unsinging and unsung. And she my stepmother, her eyes crazed white and spittleon her chin like some trapped and fevered dog, attempts to rise, but falls back into her own rank juices.

::

So then her taking from that placeand down through all the broad landsto our hearth and home. For upwards of a year she languishes in irons bound, awaiting the blooming of the may again so that she might be brought into the spring fields for the reckoning. And now the may is blooming and dressed in a verdant gown and crowned with plaited quickthorn, she is queen of the pyre. Some dance at her foot, circling and circling the maypole’s axis mundi, singing the catches of the season. Others grim with purpose lift and heave and stack the thorny bundles high.

I sit upon a white mare. Now my hair falls down my back, held at my nape by a twisted silken cord. Mounted close, my lord’s right hand covers my left. His middle finger turns my ring. We are still; we are silent. There is no triumph in the directing of these engines of redress. All must submit to the greater will that binds us in the dark. And so he tips his head the once to his watching chamberlain and the burning brands are thrust deep into the bowels of the stack.The fire cracks and spits. Inside the flames, leaves curl and cat-haws pop. Yet from our shading beech a throstle sings, a silver chain of falling notes as if to purify the air. And then, like the sound of the tearing of some mighty tree by hurricane from the rocky bonds of earth, my lady cries abroad from her eyrie, swathed in smoke and licked by tonguesof fire: Alas the day that she becamethe famous flower of serving men!And in my belly like a dancer turnsthe boy conceived in love alone, hewho as the dove foretold shall take the orb, the sceptre and the sword to rule the land in peace and plenitude. My lord, he leans from his saddle low and plucks a sprig of hokey green to tuck into my hair. I pick a single leaf. I lift itto my lips. This shall be a sacrament to be held in a locket of gold againstthe dark winds of the world and for the love that might slumber throughthe heart’s long winter but shall riseexultant with the blooming of the may.

January 05, 2015

I am the sculptor,the weaver, the giver of breath,binding the dripping forms, these homunculi, to the wires. I wrestle legless tubes and armless torsosinto shapes, disnatured,thwart, then stand awayto contemplate creation.

Satisfied, I turn to go and cracking like flags of liberationin the sudden April breeze,the garments dance revolution,disembodied, boneless, free.

And this greatfeather shamblesfills our worldout of a silenceas big as tomorrow. A voiceless revolution - secretfeet stealinga nighttime marchso that whenwe wake we are shackled aliens in thrall to a land withouthorizons.

I am a man of words, Grusha Vachnadze, as well you know.Too many words, my mother would say. They will weigh you down like stones in your pockets in a world of deeds. Not stones, but coins, mother, in a world of dreams, I would reply.

But I stray from purpose. Words as rolling jacks thrown beneath the hooves of horses. Reason is unseated; our best thoughts scattered.Now. The young lady will recall our pledge in the burning city. I fear I was about to expatiate again, there amongst the spilled olive jars and strewn garments. But you held a finger up, like a scolding nurse, and silenced me and told me yes, you would: “The answer, Simon Chachava, is yes”, you said and, amidst madness and flight, we bowed to each other deep and low, like the venal cattlemasters who have fired the land and scoured the mountains and brought me here to the very edge of battle.

Not a day passes - trudging in the wake of the infantrywith my paymaster’s coffers slung across the donkey’s back – without your face like a Chinese lantern lighting my way. Not a night passes – I, curled like a beetle larva (leaf or longhorn) in my raindrum tent – without the image bold and clear of the lady and her linen by the willows by the river and her foot, her ankle, calf and thigh extended...

Grusha Vachnadze – it is said: ‘Light and shadow by turns, but love always’.Now it’s dawn and across the valley Prince Kazbeki’s soldiers lifttheir faces into the same rain that lashes ours. By tonight – by noon –I might be just a tangle in the roots of the dead. Remember me, the manof words not made for war who loved you suddenly with all his heart.

September 24, 2014

LINGUA FRANCA*

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.George Orwell

Ever since the acquisition of words provided me with a receptacle for memory, I have loved language. Its music, its power to evoke, its absurd variety delighted me as a child and my joy in it flourished into my adolescence and youth.

My love of language took me into teaching – English first, then, for the greater part of my career, Drama. As during my time in teaching time passed and experience accumulated, goals shifted, routes changed and strategies altered. But one constant remained at the heart of whatever version of whatever syllabus I followed. It was contained within a small but perfectly formed lecture that I would deliver, not particularly original in content but imparted with a messianic zeal undiminished by time and repetition.

In it I would urge my students to take every opportunity they could to broaden their vocabularies and to recognise in language the key to knowledge, understanding, independence of mind and, ultimately, a degree of real personal autonomy. A keypoint of the address was reference to George Orwell’s 1984 and the mighty and potent weapon of Newspeak. I would ask them to examine their own speech forms – the unquestioning reliance that some may have had on deliberately vague, oblique or discursive vocabulary or on acquired slang forms whose terms of reference, however linguistically rich in their own way, were meaningless within the cultural territory that these middle class students occupied.

I would proselytise further about language as a universal resource whose capacity for articulating beauty and truth as we understand them need not be limited or constrained by social or cultural circumstances. I used as exemplars of this certain Gypsies I have known whose illiteracy, far from being an impediment to the development of language, actually provoked the need for an enhanced flexibility and richness of expression because of reliance on the purely oral form. I asked them to see that there need be no conflict of interests between their acquisition of linguistic skills and nominal subscription to a resolutely anti-intellectual culture. Indeed, such skills would provide an opportunity for agile movement across cultural territories. I would insist that the objective must be always to avoid being trapped within one register of language usage, unable to move with ease and grace from level to level.

I would conclude by telling them to read, to read anything and everything. To make it a habit; to regard every unfamiliar word, phrase, term and figure of speech as a challenge to understanding that must be met. Master language and ultimately you need never be manipulated, exploited, controlled, owned by anyone.

And they would listen politely, only glazing over if I ventured too far past the 10-minute mark. Occasionally, very occasionally, long after the event, the odd ex-student has made reference to the sermon and expressed gratitude for having been nudged towards a greater respect for language at just the right moment.

:::

For all that I can sometimes add to a well-turned sentence a word too far, only to have it collapse in on itself like some poorly constructed architectural folly, I loathe promiscuous language. Listening to cornered politicians turning on the tap and shamelessly letting it flow unchecked has me barracking from the sofa. Hysterical Oscar winners in verbal free fall, pretentious artists endeavouring to translate piles of house bricks into meaningful messages, pop stars who read a book once and now imagine themselves to be sages – all who sling words around like frisbees – have me grinding my teeth down to stumps. This is not language in search of light; it’s language whose sole context is sound!

But what really brings down the red mist is the use of language as a means to exclude all but the cognoscenti. When language becomes so abstruse, so convoluted, so comprehensively up its own arse, I know that I’m dealing with a man (almost invariably) who, were he not wielding a big fat pen, would be dealing with his sense of personal inadequacy by driving a very fast car very fast. These professional intellectuals – almost all of them inhabiting the worlds of recherché philosophy, arts theory or, God help us, linguistics – have no interest whatsoever either in language’s capacity to communicate complex concepts with absolute clarity or in its intrinsic beauty in utterance or on the page. The wielding of language is for them a kind of aristocratic sport by whose obscurantist rules and protocols they may celebrate their membership of an exclusive higher order of being.

Meanwhile, out in the bearpit a similar, if less refined game is being played. Consider the out-of-control IT jargoneer, the estate agent (realtor) describing a property and those drones who compose the letters that banks send you when you’re overdrawn. Each mangles and distorts language into something convoluted and grotesque, seeking to establish through it only the aggrandisement of his or her particular agency.

These are the true perpetrators of Word Crimes, not those whose earnest attempts to communicate are hampered because their command of classical grammar may be faulty and their non-colloquial vocabulary sparse. The latter struggles for meaning and truth; the former intends obfuscation and obscurity.

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Now, how about this document. I stumbled across it whilst doing some Internet research and as I read it I searched in vain for irony. I present it as evidence for the prosecution, item 1. It comes from a PhD dissertation entitled Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms. Okay, I might be accused of emulating Hermann Goering and reaching for my revolver at the utterance of the word ‘culture’, but please – is this an authentic statement about an area of art theory and practice so arcane that it can’t communicate its specifics without the exclusive use of entirely specialist language - or is it simply check-this-out bollocks?

A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged in art and established a seemingly unrestricted area of prodigality which I identify as viractuality. With the increased augmentation of the self via micro-electronics feasible today, the real co-exists with the virtual and the organic fuses with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested in a new interlaced sense of artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As such, viractualism strives for an understanding and depiction of an anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for no privileged logos. Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic viral disturbances they cannot contain. Here thought detaches itself from the order and authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.

Thank you for your attention. Any questions?

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A final reflection on language and meaning. In 1962 the late Harold Pinter made a statement about his perception of the real function of much the speech that we utter, ostensibly for the purposes of communication. It’s a difficult statement that requires careful reading and subsequent reflection. But there’s a world of difference between the narcissistic game playing of the writer just quoted and the elegant and painstaking proposition that is now seen as informing at the deepest level Pinter’s extraordinary work.

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished, or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

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In conclusion, I must acknowledge that much of the above may be seen to achieve little more than to prove through example the author’s claims. If that is the case then I’ll just have to try harder to pursue Samuel Beckett’s paradoxical aim of trying to pare language back to the bone through the use of language. Now, for a brief while, I shall stop talking…

*An earlier version of this post appeared on the Patteran Pages in February 2007.